The plan for simplifying and improving our alphabet, entitled “Alphabet 26,” was first presented in Westvaco Inspirations 180 in 1950. It recommended the use of only one symbol for each of the 26 letters. Our conventional alphabet contains 19 letters having dissimilar upper and lower case symbols (such as ‘A’ and ‘a’) and 7 letters (c-o-s-v-w-x-z) having symbols that are identical.
It is misleading for a letter, or for any graphic symbol, to have two different designs. Confusion might set in when school children are taught to recognize words even before they have learned to recognize different symbols for the same letter. To remedy this, Alphabet 26, a plan based upon the logic of consistency, made this recommendation for the 19 letters that have dissimilar symbols: 15 letters should use the uppercase designs [black letters above] and 4 letters should use the lowercase designs [red letters]. The other 7 letters already have identical symbols [blue letters].
Alphabet 26 provides the necessary large letters for emphasis at the beginning of the sentence and for denoting proper nouns, an advantage over the exclusive use of an all lowercase alphabet, as recommended at the Bauhaus.
The Alphabet 26 plan is applicable to all type families. The choice of Baskerville to introduce Alphabet 26 in Inspirations 180 was made for tactical, historical, and practical reasons. To appeal to as broad a segment of readers as possible, it seemed prudent to present this radical change in our time-honored alphabet with a traditional typeface rather than an extreme one, such as Futura, or even a modern one such as Bodoni. An old style typeface such as Garamond would likewise be inappropriate.
Baskerville, a transitional typeface from our own contemporary point of view, seemed to be the right choice, especially when accompanied by the mid-eighteenth century engravings of the Diderot Encyclopédie, which date from the same period. It seemed appropriate, too, to honor John Baskerville himself, whose type design was considered innovative in his time. A purely practical reason for the choice was the fact that Baskerville type possessed a lowercase main body and a small-cap body that aligned with each other, a strong point not found in Bodoni and some other faces.
Perhaps the most comprehensive article about Alphabet 26 was published in Type Talks magazine (September–October, 1958). It was written by editor Martin Spector. Entitled Bradbury Thompson’s Simplified Alphabet, excerpts from it are presented here:
In our March–April 1958 issue, Type Talks was privileged to republish an article entitled ‘How Old-Fashioned Is Our Alphabet?’ by Frank Denman. In that piece, Mr. Denman wrote, ‘Is it not time that the alphabet—the one major tool of civilization that has remained unaltered for a thousand years—be reforged into a more modern instrument?’ The question was rhetorical, but actually designers, typographers, and phonetic scholars have been at work for years on the construction of a more streamlined alphabet. Many of these experiments, however, were too unfamiliar and unwieldy for public acceptance, or in the case of some of the proposed phonetic alphabets, too complicated in their design.One man who has been attacking the problem of a simplified alphabet is art director and typographer Bradbury Thompson. Mr. Thompson begins with the premise that there are actually two alphabets in English—an uppercase alphabet and a lowercase alphabet. There are only 26 letters in the language, yet there are 45 symbols for these letters. According to Mr. Thompson, this is an illogical and unnecessary state of affairs. But we are getting ahead of his story. Here’s how—and why—Bradbury Thompson arrived at this unique design for Alphabet 26.
Brad Thompson’s experiments in designing a better alphabet began about fifteen years ago. The impetus for Alphabet 26 was provided in 1949 as he watched his young son labor over his first reader. As he watched, he made a discovery. His son was able to read the first sentence, “Run Pal,” but stumbled over the second sentence “See him run”. Obviously the boy was confused because the symbol R in the first sentence became a totally different symbol ‘r’ for the same sound in the second sentence. Results: Learning to read is that much more difficult. The act of reading is that much slower.
It was Mr. Thompson’s idea to combine the best upper- and lowercase letters into one simplified, unified alphabet using only 26 symbols. If this proposal were to be accepted, it would be the first step toward clarifying an alphabet that was designed by the Romans to express the sounds of Latin and became the staff of the English language.
Bradbury Thompson’s experiments were based on a simple precept. A graphic symbol, or for that matter any trademark worth its salt, to be efficient, should be constant. Yet the present alphabet flagrantly violates that basic precept.
Alphabet 26 provided an impetus in the fifties and sixties for lettering artists to enliven the typographic scene with the design of biform alphabets. These were unusual combinations of capital and lowercase letters within a single word or font, valued more for their visual interest and attention-getting qualities than for contributing to a simplified alphabet. Alphabet 26 also provided designers with an immediate means to produce many useful trademarks.
Implicit in the republication of Alphabet 26 is the hope that it might prompt typeface manufacturers to produce it for general use and trial. An equally important hope is that it might suggest a solution for another simplified alphabet in the future. Such a challenge could do no less than provide an enjoyable project for some young designer, as it did for the author thirty-eight years ago in Westvaco Inspirations 180.
Paul Baker, with feedback from the late Bradbury Thompson, has produced a new, digital version of Alphabet 26. It will soon be available here, and from Monotype Typography.